Affinity Designer is a vector-design app that’s been created specifically for the Mac and OS X. It offers smooth panning and zooming, more than 1,000,000 percent zoom, and an unfussy interface. It's fair to call it a genuine alternative to Illustrator.

Photoshop-style bitmap image editors work with pixels, and therefore require large file sizes in order to preserve resolution. By comparison, vector-based illustrations are lightweight and able to scale up or down without a loss in quality, but finding quality App Store solutions for creating and editing such files can be a challenge. One such option is Inkpad, which has now gone from paid to free with the most recent release – and not the kind of free that involves in-app purchases to be useful. Instead, developer Taptrix made the app open source, allowing others to build upon its work and contribute to future versions.

According to a recent filing, Apple has started using illustrations for a patent that are a 1:1 copy of an application by another developer already in the App Store. The App is called Where To and FutureTap's founder, Ortwin Gentz, wrote a blog post noting that Apple used an illustration of his application in a patent filing entitled, "Systems and Methods for Accessing Travel Services using a Portable Electronic Device."